The Long Slow Death of the 5 Year Plan

20th Century Rules

The 20th century had it’s ideal life. Work hard, keep your nose clean, don’t cause too much trouble, if any. Pay the mortgage. Save for college. Remember retirement. This bourgeois ideal worked well enough for a time, but that time has passed. Are we made to work day in, day out on the same projects in the same environments and with the same people? Are our minds satisfied when we do? Are there any alternatives? Are those alternative lifestyles worth the sacrifice they possibly entail?

These are existential questions in their own right though they may not appear as lofty as “why am I here” or “is there a g-d?” (for the record I’ve answered those questions already. DM me for deets)

As this new century spreads before us it is worth asking what the perfect life looks like. But of course before we have to do this, we have to realize that there is no such thing as the perfect life. Whatever our choices and decisions, chasing perfection is an exercise in futility. But we can have a better life than what we’ve come to expect. What we were taught doesn’t compute in this new world. Not for the majority of us. There will always be hedge funders, and media tycoons, and the “somehow rich.” Also dentists. But they aren’t real people. So why bother talking about them?

We All Had A Mortgage

No one works in the same career their whole lives anymore. There is no such thing as job security. So the above dictates have become flattened. What used to be yesterday’s alternative lifestyle, multiple careers, lots of freelancing, moving to where the jobs are, is on its way to becoming the new normal.

We are all about to become a whole lot less comfortable and secure. Here is why:

1. The legacy of outsourced jobs
2. The lunatic short term demands of Wall Street
3. Our National debt
4. The scourge of international terrorism
5. A political class too polarized to function properly
6. The end of privacy
7. The beginning of transparency

We are entering uncharted waters and we can’t return to the shore we’ve departed. If we have the intelligence to look back, we can see that those shores are of little worth returning to anyway. But the mystery we confront now is paralyzing. Many of us cannot move forward. Remember 5 year plans? They were supposed to be the epitome of effective planning. If you didn’t have a 5 year plan, then you were bust, you were a loafer, a bum.

The Death of 5 Year Plans

Well, I never had a 5 year plan. And I am doing better than most of the people that had theirs printed and framed and hung above their beds. Of course this isn’t personal but general. That being said, how the hell can you have a 5 year plan when the world changes every 5 months! That is just the reality we operate under now. There is no 5 years from now. Because tomorrow something is going to be invented, or a bomb will go off, or a company will go bankrupt, or a country will default, or a currency will be devalued, or a politician will get caught lying, or or OR OR OR!

So what is the sense in planning? You could make that argument that planning can at least give you a base. Yes, you could argue that, but I don’t know what value that “base of operations” would provide. You’d simply go about making a new plan. But you won’t have learned the lesson that plans are meaningless. Even the best laid plans….

So what can you do?

You can make yourself as useful and valuable as possible. You can acquire new skills, you can learn new technologies, familiarize yourself with the vocabulary of the 21st century. At the very least this is what you should be doing. At the very most you should be disentangling yourself from the strictures and mandates and ruling philosophies of a worn out and thoroughly denuded lifestyle. The last century is over. So go on getting over it.

I am constantly struck by the sheer number of people who think they are immune from the disruptions that have shattered business models, upended lives, whole economies. I’ve got friends still stuck on stupid. And these are smart people. Far smarter than I. By a factor of ten in some cases. And yet they cannot see the drastic societal changes occurring around them. And part of that is because it is not in fact going on around them. Their lives go on, their employees keep paying them. The watering holes they frequent and the friends and peers they spend their time with are stuck in the same pasture, battling the same windmill.

But there is a reckoning going on, sweeping this culture. Who knows where the broom will go next? There is no rhyme, there is no reason. But change is afoot.

Image Size: Zieak on Flickr